PARADISE IN PROGRESS — SAN DIEGO’S NEED FOR AN INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN

Q: Is this something that the council is united on in the thinking this has got to be a big priority?

A: I think there’s pretty unanimous support. If someone trips and falls and gets injured, the city is liable, despite the fact that the sidewalk is technically owned by the property owner, not the city, which is a common misconception. We’ve had “trip and fall” lawsuits and they’re typically not huge. We have to do the “condition assessment” so that we can actually get to the point where we know what the problem is and fix it. It was not in Bob Filner’s original budget. I pushed hard for it. Some of my colleagues pushed hard for it. And we got it in there.

Q: The infamous $900 million backlog, does that include Balboa Park buildings, which are something like $200 million just on their own?

A: When it comes to city building facilities, the city commissioned a report a couple of years ago called the Parsons Report. We brought in a consultant who analyzed 443 of the city’s roughly 1,600 building facilities. And when we’re talking about the 1,600, that’s everything from Qualcomm Stadium and City Hall all the way down to a little restroom down at the beach. So that’s kind of the scope of what we’re dealing with. They analyzed about a quarter of those and came up with that $898 million that you referenced. I don’t believe it was comprehensive. And so there may be some of that [Balboa Park] that’s in there. The one thing we were able to push for this year and got included in the budget was just over a quarter-million dollars for the Park and Rec Department to start doing an inventory of all their assets and start getting the ball rolling on doing a condition assessment of their facilities, as well.

Q: I’m almost certain that it does not include whatever upgrades might be necessary to the Point Loma Sewage Treatment, which could be more than a billion dollars right there.

A: Absolutely. One of the reasons this is very timely is as we’re in this very abbreviated campaign for mayor, and I think there needs to be a litmus test for the mayoral candidates and we’re calling it “Admit, Commit, Rebuild.” The “admit” part is understanding that the $898 million number that’s been thrown around a lot is an incomplete number. It is a number that was based on essentially three asset categories. Streets and roads we talked about already, which is just over $500 million. It was based on stormwater (facilities). It was based on the city building facilities that I just referenced, the 443 of those. So you can see that everything else is not part of that $898 million. Fire stations, police stations, parks, sidewalks, I mean, all these other things are not part of that number. Point Loma, Qualcomm Stadium, City Hall, you start adding everything together it’s well north of a billion and it could be north of 2 billion. The reality is we don’t know what that (total) number is. And so I think all of the candidates for mayor need to publicly recognize that ($898 million) number is low, it’s incomplete, and that the number is actually much higher than that.

Q: Also incomplete is how to pay for it. What are the options you are studying?

A: There have been a number of ideas that have been put on the table. It’s one of the things that we’re doing as we press forward with the five-year infrastructure plan — which by the way, most large government entities have a five-year infrastructure plan. It’s pretty common. The port has one. The county has one. Most large cities have one. Not only does the city of San Diego not have one, we can’t find evidence that we’ve ever had one. We may have had one at some point long ago but we haven’t seen it. And it certainly hasn’t been recently. So that is a significant problem when you’re dealing with something like infrastructure, which is, by its nature, a long-term proposition. If you don’t have a strategic plan for how you’re going to tackle this you’re shooting in the dark. And that’s essentially what the city has been doing for as long as anyone can remember. The need right now vastly outstrips the resources we have to fill that need. We need to be able to prioritize projects. We can’t do them all at once. We need to not be dictating from city hall which projects get priority in neighborhoods throughout the city. I know my district pretty well. I could probably have a pretty decent understanding of whether, you know, a community prioritizes this project versus that project. But we’ve got 42 community planning groups. We’ve got neighborhoods all around the city that I wouldn’t pretend to know how things should be prioritized. Neighborhood input is going to be a permanent part of the process by which we develop these priorities. That is something that I think is going to be extremely important going forward, and again something I think the mayoral candidates need to commit to, is making sure that neighborhood input is something that we are giving high priority to as we rank these projects and get them filled.

Q: Are you still trying to shoot for the 2014 ballot for some sort of voter guidance on a tax increase or a bond issue?

A: The committee is not looking at that at this point. And the reason is because until we come out with the five-year plan we don’t even know what we’re dealing with here. I mean, what would we even ask the voters for at this point? We don’t even know what the price tag is. We don’t even know what we’d go to the ballot for if we were to do that so we’re not at that point yet. We really need to focus on getting the five-year plan together, getting as much data as we can so we know what we’re talking about and then figure out ways that we can pay for it.

Q: What is your timetable for development of the five-year plan?

A: Our goal is to have it in outline/draft form by the end of this calendar year for adoption as part of the next year’s budget cycle. So it’ll be April-ish when it would be really out there and the council would adopt it as part of that. And it’s going to be a rolling document, a “living” document. It’ll be updated every so often. It’ll just kind of depend on how the projects are done. But projects will go off as they get completed and new projects will go on.

Q: You issued something of a challenge to the candidates for mayor to address all this in the campaign. What would you want to hear?

A: I want to hear that infrastructure is a priority. But I want to hear more firmly what they plan to do about it. I think partly as a result of Filner’s campaign we’ve heard a lot of talk about neighborhoods. People talk a lot about how they’re going to invest in neighborhoods. And that’s good. That is absolutely a worthy goal and we should all be doing it. But when I met with Bob right after we both got sworn in, in December, he said that he was looking for small opportunities where he could do a ribbon cutting or something like that in each neighborhood or in each council district to show that he was getting a quick win, whether it was a little park project or something like that. And that’s how he wanted to demonstrate his commitment to neighborhoods — by these little quick-win projects that were cheap and were easily done. That’s not a commitment to neighborhoods. That is window dressing for a commitment to neighborhoods. What I want to see is an actual commitment to neighborhoods, which is “Admit, Commit, Rebuild,” and that is showing that you understand that the problem is larger than the $898 million, using neighborhood input to prioritize all these projects, and recognizing that City Hall does not have all the solutions. And then rebuilding — we’ve got to bond while interest rates are low, we’ve got to build while construction costs are also relatively low. Those are both going to go up. We know that. And then also dedicate a chunk, ideally at least half, of any surplus tax revenues coming into the city over the next several years, to infrastructure, recognizing this is the biggest issue facing the city right now. We’ve got other issues — public safety, the issues we have in our police department with officer retention and recruitment. That is a big issue as well. But infrastructure is the thing that we hear about the most. It’s the thing we’ve neglected the longest. And it needs to be a commitment with a real plan by each of the major candidates. This really requires vision and leadership from the mayor.

San Diegans know first hand the infrastructure problems facing the city. From pot-holed streets to buckling sidewalks and neglected buildings, the city is in need of a makeover. After being elected City Council president in December, Todd Gloria created a city infrastructure committee and named Councilman Mark Kersey to lead the panel. The U-T Editorial Board met with Kersey recently to discuss the infrastructure challenges. The following is a condensed and edited transcript of the interview.